PCRE vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

USN-173-1 fixed a buffer overflow vulnerability in the PCRE library.
However, it was found that the various python packages and gnumeric
contain static copies of the library code, so these packages need to
be updated as well.

In gnumeric this bug could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with
the privileges of the user if the user was tricked into opening a
specially crafted spreadsheet document.

In python, the impact depends on the particular application that uses
python’s “re” (regular expression) module. In python server
applications that process unchecked arbitrary regular expressions with
the “re” module, this could potentially be exploited to remotely
execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the server.